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Monday, July 26, 2010

Join me THIS sunday, august 1 for a writers workshop focused on Publishing!

In addition to the hunger many people have to publish their collection of poems, or write their first novel, they simply do not know where to start once the manuscript takes shape. It is daunting for writers and poets to consider the overwhelming world of publication options. Can you self-publish? Should you get an agent? What is the benefit of working with small presses?

To help answer these questions and offer publishing inspiration to Tacoma's writers and poets, I will be offering a class called, Indie Lit Chicks on Publishing: A Writers Workshop on Sunday, Aug. 1 from 2-4:30 p.m. for only $10 at Urban Grace Church. RSVP me directly: tamsugah@aol.com

Joining me to co-teach and host a Q&A session on topics such as self-publication, literary agents, funding, marketing and independent press publication will be two guest authors, Gina Frangello and Zoe Zolbrod. The authors will also read from their latest novels and books will be available for purchase and signing.

Perhaps you have always wanted to write a book but don't know where to start. Or maybe you have chapters for a novel or a drawer full of poetry, and you just don't know what to do with them? Take your first step toward making a dream come true and attend my Poet Laureate workshop--open to poets & writers of all styles:

Join three published women writers and editors to get helpful publication information, encouragement, support, creative ideas and inspiration to write your own book this year! Come enjoy a rich, helpful lecture on how to publish your work by three women who were told no many times or rejected, but did it by themselves anyway! Enjoy a discussion, author lecture, author and poet readings, book signings and more. You will be an active part of the intensive Q&A we will be hosting about courage, commitment, funding, nuts & bolts, and creative marketing with writers just like you who started off with only a dream. You Can Do It!

Sunday, July 11, 2010

This is a poem based on one of the many teenage memories i have of being shuttled back and forth the US by greyhound bus. We rode for 3000 mile, 4 day treks across the states after my parents got divorced and chose to live on opposite coasts. I have not been able to shake, for decades, the sad impression south dakota and generally many parts of middle america left upon me. The people and the places seen from a bus window. A grievousness threaded through those unending, arid, desolate areas that i could not ignore or shrug off. It seemed to overcome me... and the heat-- suffocating! To be sure, the sad world of it mirrored the room of my own heavy heart.

Badlands by Way of Bus, 1983

The summer my mother sent me back east to let my father handle thingsI saw South Dakota streak itself into one hot, monotonous painted nude.

There, linear beige landscape edgesblurred and drowsed in the browning noontime heat. The whole busload of us lumbering in and out of restless sleepacross that flat bleary expanse of ochre prairie and acres of lashing grass.

It overcame me, all that impossibilityand lifelessness; dead from tryingas far as the eye could see save the apparition of austere green mileposts. They existed as the only place of interestonce my Sony Walkman batteries quit.The steel rectangular markersracked up points of desperation.Always approaching then leaving. Counting off failureand lost hope in whole numbers to me and the other passengers: you are going somewhere;you are going nowhere.I watched them grow in sizeto infinity—Until they didn’t count at all.

Miles lateran oval-shaped, peach sign facebroke the monotonyas we lurched into Rapid City.Up ahead, it waved to me—as if making a promiseabove the baking pavement heatuntil I realizedit was just another gritty teenage girllike me. A runaway, I guessed,strapped down with a crappy knapsack. In a t-shirt with no bra, and jeans that had been drawn uponwith magic marker—her thighs coveredin peace symbols, butterflies and hearts.

I would runaway from here too, if I were smart, I thought, as I watched the gust from our stopping busblow dust and lift her cornsilk hair high up in mermaid waves. I heard the word, Calientehiss like compression brakesfrom the Montana farmhand who carried a duct-taped cardboard box as luggage. He clucked his tonguefrom the back of the bushaving been waiting to read a sign like this since clear back in Bozeman.